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Thursday, August 19, 2010

In 8th grade, our experience with Destination: Imagination resumed the strange and disturbing journey that had begun in 6th grade (here) and continued in 7th grade (here). This year, the challenge we chose was to write, perform, and create the set for a mystery. The greater focus on story allowed us to come up with our most twisted plot yet.

Our skit began with a number of business executives from a huge food conglomerate gathering at a large mansion, belonging to the executive from England. Other countries who were represented included the United States, Russia, Germany, and Iraq, all complete with accents. They were meeting to discuss how to increase sales by adding addictives to their food. This way people would not be able to stop eating their products.

But as the meeting progressed, people began to disappear, killed by one of the people at the mansion. One of my favorite conversations was when we were planning how people should be killed. People threw out a number of ideas. “How about a gun?” “No.” “Knife?” “No.” “Gas chamber?” “No.” “Anthrax?” “YES!” That’s right, we settled on anthrax as our weapon of choice. Keep in mind that we performed this in the spring of 2001, mere months before the real anthrax scare after 9/11. I’m half surprised we didn’t get waterboarded and interrogated about giving the idea to the bad guys.

Also, through the entire skit, we sprinkled about red herrings that led the audience to believe that it was the Iraqi who was doing the killing. Politically correct, we were not. But in the end, it turned out to be the German, who wanted control of the conglomerate for himself.

Once, when Eric "C" and I were working on the set, a portion of it had to be painted. But first, the PVC pipe we were using had to be primed. So we busted open a can of purple primer and started going to town. However, since this was a frigid day in February, we opted to keep the garage door closed, which meant the fumes from the primer had no place to go, except for our nostrils. After an hour of unintentionally inhaling primer fumes in an unventilated garage, we were high as kites when we went back into the house. This event has left me without the ability to smell rubber cement, and C and I think that the purple primer incident has possibly handicapped our IQ and led to some our less successful decisions in life.